Before you blow your precious time on this post, feel free to listen to this podcast AND then come back and finish reading. Done? Ok, great. My takeaway was that my "productive" life is filled with all kinds of tangents. Most, never diverge back into anything. They remain un-attended appendages, dangling in my mind until some unforseen force lops them off.
Being the tinkerer I am, I set out to rid myself of all the estraneous shit that has plagued my GSD system for the past year. In doing so, I ended up with three objects that will be an integral part of my productivity strides in 2013. And without further ado, a list:
For the lamen in the room, IRL is broken down nicely here, especially the second definition. Anywho, this by far is the category with the most stuff in it. The most being two.
I have always struggled to fit Field Notes and the smaller Moleskines into my life. They seem just small enough where I struggle to get anything coherent into them. Moreover, there are little times where I raise pen to paper and don't write an epic novella. By holding onto the fact that anything placed into these little guys must be brilliant, I almost never actually write anything in them. They just take up way too much space around the house and eventually, the wife ends up throwing them out or using them to write down grocery lists.
Where the thought of a grocery list in them used to revolt me, I have begun to use them in the same fashion. They aren't a recepticle for the next Odyssey, they are a utilitarian piece of paper. Once I got this wrapped around my head, their use has become all the more apparent. I throw variables that I need to remember in there, the three big things I need to do today, really whatever. At the end of the week, when my review comes around I pull the current one out and flip through it, jotting down anything that needs to be remembered. Very freeing, and with the Field Notes brand going bannanas these days, it is easy to find a cedar recepticle to store your used ones in.
This is a recent puchase that was more of a whim, than anything. Having never subscribed to the action method, I had no idea what I was getting into. The draw was that the book itself is refillable and dot paper is the shit. After using it for a couple of weeks it has a place in my life that is more permanent than a Field Notes book. I am more apt to use each page on a project by project base and link everything together with a table of contents. There isn't as much feedom as with the Field Notes, however this notebook doesn't tend to travel far from my workbench. In addition, I enjoy the paper size and tend to doodle and draw in-between notes, where space is at a premium with the Field Notes.
This one is easy: Omnifocus. I spent a good amount of time in 2009 in an attempt to fit Omnifocus into my workflow. The idea of GTD was simple however, and this is something I can't comprehend now, Omnifocus just didn't gel. It was always a struggle to get information into the program along with organizing it once it was there. 2 Years later in 2011 I was doing a small side project and it all clicked.
Ever since, I have put my faith in Omnigroup both on the iPad and the iPhone. Due to the high amount of content already available about this application, I am going to keep things light and say that yes, it is complicated but, very much worth it. Once you grep the overall workflow I doubt you will go back to a "simpler" solution. Moreover, the Omnigroup has recently announced Omnifocus 2 which means that they plan to align the Mac version with the much more updated mobile variants
These three arms have kept my mind free to creativly think about upcoming projects as well as keep everything considered "current," on track. Things will probably change, they always do, rest assured, I might write about it.